Many types of businesses, such as customer service organizations or credit collection agencies, utilize automated call distribution systems which route incoming or outbound telephone calls to operators or agents in one or more various departments. Such systems assign at least one agent to a particular type of call campaign prior to initiation of the call campaign. The agents remain attached to the one preselected call campaign until the completion of the call campaign.
The prior art systems are limited, however, in that the assigned agents are bound to that particular call campaign until the agent, or agent supervisor, logs the agent onto a new call campaign. As one call campaign encounters periods of reduced activity, while other executing call campaign encounters periods of over-burdening activity, the agents are incapable of providing assistance to the other call campaigns without manual, supervisory intervention.
Some systems provide additional resources, such as overflow agents, which are allocated to the call campaigns during the periods of increased activity to assist the over burdened agents. However, these overflow agents remain idle between assignments, thus resulting in inefficient added costs as well as the need for additional resources.
An additional limitation of the prior art systems is realized as multiple call campaigns come to an end at the same time. Although the activity of the call campaigns is reduced due to the lessened number of calls to service, the preselected number of agents assigned to each campaign are bound to their respective campaigns until the campaign is completed. The inability of the systems to shift agents to different individual call campaigns or multiple call campaigns, as the call activity decreases, results in system inefficiencies and increased costs.
Accordingly, what is needed is a system and method for providing agents with multi-threaded campaign attributes such that agents may be assigned to multiple call campaigns simultaneously. As the need for an agent decreases on one campaign and increases on another, the agent is automatically shifted to the over burdened call campaign. Further, what is needed is such a method for automatically shifting the agents from one call campaign to another, without the requirement of supervisory intervention, while automatically adjusting or controlling call pacing.